Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (101 page)

The piper’s on his way

Did he imagine himself as the Pied Piper? If so, he had clearly not recognized the implications of the fairy tale. Was it a song for Tracey and Linda, or was it a hastily dashed-off sketch of the uncomplicated role he would have liked to imagine for himself in the world, something like J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, an incorruptible guardian and champion of innocence? Whatever his intentions, the song amounted to little more than a rough demo, the suggestion of another song it could only be imagined he might someday come to write. The whole double session, in fact, could scarcely be viewed as anything more than an experiment in diversity, but neither Sam nor his new a&r man was fazed in the least. “What was so great about Sam,” said Al Schmitt, “was that he was willing to try anything. He had total control, but he was open to everything. I knew we were going to come out with something [that would] knock everybody on their ears.”

In this case, they had to wait two weeks for all the elements to coalesce. Sam had returned to California by this time after headlining a big outdoor show,
Blues Under the Stars,
at Wrigley Field in Chicago on August 15. The show drew forty-five thousand people and included everyone from Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, and Etta James to Motown stars Marvin Gaye and Little Stevie Wonder, but it was Sam who really incited the crowd, and, with Charles already en route to California in the Rolls, it was left to Duck to save him from the mob that broke through security lines and surged around him happily onstage. The Muslims pursued him no less ardently, as Cassius Clay and his wife, Sonji, who had just been married in Gary, Indiana, the day before, showed up with a large retinue of Black Muslims led by his new manager, Herbert Muhammad, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad’s son. They were all over Sam, said his brother L.C., hustling his ass and telling him everything the Nation of Islam had done for the champ. “You didn’t do nothing for Ali,” Sam said indignantly. “Ali did for Ali, just like I’m doing for Sam. You wouldn’t even be talking to me if I wasn’t Sam Cooke.” And with that, he turned his attention back to Ali and his beautiful new bride, a sophisticated twenty-seven-year-old woman of the world whom Sam knew from the clubs but who, after her introduction to Ali by Herbert Muhammad and their whirlwind romance that summer, had announced her intention to convert to Islam. “There are two types of artists, artists and con artists,” Sam told Bobby and left little doubt as to which category he believed the official hierarchy of the Black Muslims belonged.

He called a session in Los Angeles five days later, once again with his own band, once again, surprisingly, to record a single song. The song was one he had given to the Sims Twins nearly two years earlier, a typical Sam Cooke composition built around a familiar phrase and then given a distinctive twist—but in the Sims’ version, the song, “That’s Where It’s At,” achieved none of the poignancy that Sam had imagined for it. Now, spurred on perhaps by the downhome flavor of the Chicago blues festival, and pricked no doubt by the rise of what was now widely referred to as “soul music,” the strong gospel-based sound that had started to dominate the charts, he set out to create what could be taken almost as a template for that sound. “You’ve got to go back to what you know,” he had told Don Covay, one of the most influential of the young soul songwriters, whose first big hit on his own, “Mercy, Mercy,” had just been released. He had offered similar advice to Otis Redding and Solomon Burke, whose music reflected the same explicit embrace of a tradition that had long been represented, in different ways, by Sam, Ray Charles, Jackie Wilson, Clyde McPhatter, and James Brown—but never so explicitly as part of a “movement,” never so unapologetically as an affirmation of identity. “Write about what you know, write about what you’ve experienced, write about what you observe,” he told them. “Write about natural things, you’ve got to come out of the future and get back to the past, to what you knew when you were a little kid.” Most important of all, he said over and over again with what each one took to be the fervor of true belief, “All you gotta do is be yourself.”

That is what he now set out to do. Where the Sims Twins had given the song a bright, bouncy feel, Sam at first took it almost at a crawl, with a small four-piece horn section providing a steady choral-like backdrop, and Bobby’s tremolo-touched lead providing more than a suggestion of the gospel sound. It didn’t go smoothly at first. Sam’s voice was a little raw, the horns couldn’t get the off-kilter feel he was looking for, and he expressed uncharacteristic irritation at the rhythm section for rushing him (“They backwards to what I’m singing,” he declared. “That’s why I’m annoyed”). Most of all, though, he was frustrated at not being able to achieve the objective he had set for himself: the communication of unfiltered emotion. Finally, on the fourteenth take, it all began to come together as Bobby moved to a higher register and the band, at Sam’s direction, picked up the tempo a little. The song remained as raw as Sam intended it, with the horns capturing some of the sweet-and-sour dissonance of a New Orleans marching band, and the drag of the tempo against intentionally ambiguous lyrics (“Your world turned upside down / You making not a sound / No one else around / That’s where it’s at”) becoming a kind of implicit statement about mortality and the passage of time.

He continued for another twenty-four takes, proving once again his contention that the simplest effects were achieved only with the most arduous application of effort. Here arduousness yielded to almost painful deliberation, as he bore down for six more takes to create a ragged vocal overdub, seemingly spontaneous and out of synch, that suggested profound regret in the midst of romantic celebration. “Your heart beating fast,” he sang, “You’re knowing that time will pass / But hoping that it’ll last”—and then the song’s title, the last line of each verse and the single line of each chorus, providing a melancholy reminder, against the explicit manner in which the song would surely be taken, that this is all there is—this is how fragile and evanescent are our pleasures.

You say, “It’s time to go”

And she says, “Yes, I know

But just stay one minute more”

That’s where it’s at

The chorus took it out, triple-, quadruple-tracked with only Sam’s ironic laugh and a “pretty baby” thrown in to punctuate the fragmented reading of the single line, as the horns provided a soft pillow for vocals and guitar. It was as if in one moment Sam had summed up an entire chapter in his life and then, regretfully, made up his mind to move on. For at that moment, he knew it was time to go, even as he sought to linger for just one minute more.

2 | THE SHADOW WORLD

It changes. A lot of things change. Money is popping, and everything is happening, and it’s hard to separate the difference. Everybody want a piece of the pie: you can spread it everywhere and have nothing. And then you just like you were. You’re slaving.

— Sam to Bobby Womack, 1964

T
HE VALENTINOS KEPT AFTER SAM
about their upcoming session all during their two-week tour together, which was billed as “Sam Cooke and His Revue, Featuring the Valentinos.” They wanted a full horn section in the studio, just like all the other SAR acts got, and nothing Sam said could dissuade them. The horns would just get in the way carrying the background parts, Sam said. If they stuck with what they had, they could compete with some of those new English groups like the Animals. The Animals? Bobby said. He hated the fucking Animals, whose “House of the Rising Sun,” a gloomy minor-key version of the American folk song, was currently number one on the pop charts. They were just another one of those English groups that couldn’t sing. But Sam told him he was going to have to lower his musical standards. He said, “Listen to what the song is saying. It sounds like a haunted house.” He said what people were looking for was no more, and no less, than
communication;
it wasn’t a question of outsinging the other fellow anymore, like in the gospel days, it was all about getting your message across. More and more writers from behind the scenes were becoming artists, he told Bobby, because “they don’t sound as good, but the people believe them more.” And
that
was what was going to lead to the revolution that he saw coming: a day when the marketplace wouldn’t distinguish between black and white.

Sometimes, Bobby thought, Sam might have been better off if he could have listened to his own advice. Three days before the Valentinos’ session, on September 16, he appeared on the premiere episode of
Shindig!,
the first prime-time weekly show devoted to rock ’n’ roll. He was co-headliner with the Everly Brothers, and his appearance was widely touted in the trades (“The Negro beat & blues singer . . . has rarely been seen on network TV,”
Variety
reported in an access of well-intentioned enthusiasm), but rather than take advantage of the opportunity, he chose to represent himself with a weird mélange of styles. While folk singers Jackie and Gayle featured Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s “Up Above My Head” in their opening medley, and the rapidly rising white West Coast duo who called themselves the Righteous Brothers showcased their own black gospel sound, Sam sang two selections from his new supper-club fare, “Tennessee Waltz” and “Blowin’ in the Wind,” as the
Shindig!
Dancers, an outlandish collection of neatly scrubbed go-go girls clearly designed to appeal to a mainstream audience, pranced and ponied and, for the Dylan number, sedately mimicked ecstatic abandon. Sam’s practiced gestures only enhanced the incongruity, particularly on “Blowin’ in the Wind,“ as his right hand trailed off to show the way a cannonball might slide, his left fluttered to illustrate the song’s central metaphor in a manner that appeared almost self-satirizing and certainly contradicted his heartfelt advice to Bobby to focus on words and message alone.

It was only with the show’s closing number, an Everly Brothers’ version of Little Richard’s “Lucille” with the entire cast assembled onstage and the credits rolling, that Sam got untracked. The Everlys are standing alone at the mike, wailing away in harmony, when Sam comes trotting out with his guitar, finds a place in between the two brothers, and interjects some of the gospel fervor that was so conspicuously missing from his own performance. It is a curious moment, as Sam, ever watchful, seems willing to reveal this side of himself only as a kind of afterthought, but none of the reviewers seemed to notice, and Sam was already on to other things.

The tryout that Earl McGrath had promised him for an upcoming Twentieth Century Fox picture was scheduled for the week of October 5, and he and Alex flew into New York on the weekend, within hours of the birth of Alex’s daughter, Adrienne. Sam read a scene from a recent Sidney Poitier film, taking on the role that Sidney had played with all of his customary aplomb. Earl was so confident that Sam would get the part that he had stills shot and directed the legal department to draw up a contract.

Sam met with Allen while he was in New York to discuss the immediate future. He was still pissed off about the new single release. He had wanted to put out “Yeah Man,” the litany of dances set to the Valentinos’ distinctive beat that he had recorded in March, but Allen had hated it. In fact, violating one of his own cardinal rules for managing—not for the first time, and not by just a little—he told Sam it was the worst fucking song he had ever heard in his entire life. “What the fuck do you know?” Sam shot back. It was the kind of stripped-down, simplified number he was convinced the kids would go for. But in the end he had allowed himself to be swayed by Allen’s opinion, and now the single they had released, “Cousin of Mine,” which Allen had insisted was a cute little song that they could sell pop, had shipped fewer copies than any single Sam had put out in three years, and they had thrown away “That’s Where It’s At” on the B-side.

It burned Sam up. He
knew
“Yeah Man” would have been a hit, but Allen had been right about so many other things, he told Alex, and the thing about it was, the fucker wouldn’t back down, even if you put a gun to his head. Sam seemed to take Allen’s obstinacy as a kind of challenge, he appeared to believe that if he could impress Allen, the whole world would be impressed. “That motherfucker doesn’t tell me what I want to hear,” he told Clif. “He tells me what I need to hear.”

So far, almost everything Allen had promised had come true. The second $100,000 of Sam’s $450,000 advance from RCA was scheduled to arrive on October 15, the
Live at the Copa
album was due out any day, and Allen reassured him that his Christmas booking at the Casanova Room at Miami’s chi-chi Deauville Hotel was practically all set. Allen himself was off to England to make a deal with Mickie Most, the twenty-six-year-old manager and producer of the Animals, Herman’s Hermits, and the Nashville Teens, the three groups that, after the Beatles and the Dave Clark Five (with whom Allen already had a deal), had dominated the British charts all fall. Allen was ready to guarantee a million dollars in front money for Most in exchange for a percentage of Most’s management commission on all of his acts and, ultimately, ownership of the masters. He worried that Sam would be jealous, but Sam had neither the time nor the inclination. The question was no longer one entirely of theft or cooptation; Sam had long since come to recognize that these British groups were opening up another market for his music. Allen had told him that the Beatles wanted him on their show; the Rolling Stones’ success with Bobby’s song was bringing in money to Bobby and Kags. Allen could build an empire of his own as far as Sam was concerned, as long as he kept his deal with Sam front and center.